


To you I belong, however time may wear me away

by brooklyninthesummer



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AKA, Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes-centric, Childhood Memories, Endgame, Established Relationship, God i guess, M/M, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Slow Dancing, What Do I Tag This Oh God, i guess?, in this house we pretend that the movie Which Shall Not Be Named never happened, of sorts, praying, this is all very vague, what even are memories anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 16:38:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18782080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brooklyninthesummer/pseuds/brooklyninthesummer
Summary: Somewhere, in a lab far below the ground, God knows where, James Buchanan Barnes opens a small chamber in his brain and crams the memory inside it.How do you fit a person, an entire existence, into mere particles?





	To you I belong, however time may wear me away

**To Mø, who has had to deal with my breakdowns over this for the last week.**

**-I love you 3000.**

 

 

 _Guildenstern: What's the first thing you remember?_  
_Rosencrantz: [thinks] No, it's no good. It was a long time ago._  
_Guildenstern: No, you don't take my meaning. What's the first thing you remember after all the things you've forgotten?_  
_Rosencrantz: Oh, I see... I've forgotten the question._

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Somewhere, in a lab far below the ground, God knows where, James Buchanan Barnes opens a small chamber in his brain and crams the memory inside it.

How do you fit a person, an entire existence, into mere particles?  
The memory of their face, which began from a mass of photons on your retina, the signal sent to your visual cortex.  
The sound of their voice in your ear, the sound waves transformed into electrical signals by your auditory cortex.  
The feeling of their touch on your skin, a hand on your shoulder maybe, a tight squeeze.  
Thousands of moments associated with them, smells and sounds, the weather on a day at the beach, the rain on your skin, soaking through your clothes, when you’re running to catch the last train of the day home.  
Throw a few hormones into the mix, for the context. The person gives you a good, safe feeling.  
This, alongside endless other inputs of data, is what fundamentally makes up your memory of this whole person.

(How do you fit _Steven Grant Rogers_ , world-renowned idiot and now, apparently, Captain America, into a single memory?)  
_(you can at least try.)_

Newly attained information stays encoded in your short-term memory for twenty to thirty seconds, if not repeated or rehearsed numerous times. Attending to this information, though, can commit it to long-term memory, like if you go over it again and again or break it up into smaller, easier to remember segments.  
A long-term memory can stay in your subconscious for anything spanning from days to decades — based on the relevance associated with it.  
The more frequently you recall a memory, the more likely you are to remember it easier the next time, as frequent recollection strengthens the synapse connections between your neurons. Thus, the less you access a memory, the weaker and more prone to replacement by another memory it gets.

Bucky thinks of Steve and a million things come to his mind at once. The dark and bleak of his cell is suddenly replaced by a thousand different voices and noises. A million different smells fill his nostrils and he thinks he can taste ice cream, thick, black coffee, hot dogs and Sarah Rogers’ infamous apple tart on his tongue all at once. Filtering out from the muss of voices is the one he’ll always remember the best. Melodic and deep, way too deep for his small, delicate body. Even before his voice had broken, it was already deeper than any other boy’s voice in their grade — even Bucky’s. Thinking back, everything about Steve Rogers seemed as though it was too big for the small body he had been given. His too-large nose that Bucky could’ve been staring at, admiring it, all day long. His comically big feet, even bigger than Bucky’s. His heart, too good and big for this world. (His pride, Goddammit Rogers, always picking fights left and right.)  
Bucky wants to snort: It’s like he has been pre-destined for this new body.  
No matter how hard he’d have tried, Bucky knows this, he never could’ve stopped Steve from agreeing to Project Rebirth. He’d been Captain America long before he went into that chamber.

A kiss, on the fire-escape, the hot summer air and the busy noises of the city around them.  
A touch, intimate, in a stuffy tent somewhere in France, the noises of crickets chirping around them, the smell of battlefield; blood and gun-powder. The grime forever stuck underneath their nails.  
A whispered promise, passed between panting mouths sharing a breath — “Promise that if anything happens, you won’t come looking for me, for my body. It’s gonna be okay. You need to save the world.” And so much more beyond that. _You’ve got someone else waiting for you, ready to love you. She can give you the life you always wanted, the life I could never give you. You’ll love her, you already do. I see it in the way you look at her, the way you look at me. It’s okay._

Suddenly he’s five nine twelve sixteen twenty-two again, in dark alleyways in Brooklyn, behind the school where the teachers wouldn’t catch you smoking, in his mothers kitchen as she, once again, tells the story of how she’s met his dad, talking as if he didn’t rearrange her face every other day, in front of a fireplace fueled by old newspapers from the streets in a shitty, run-down apartment because the money didn’t suffice for anything better, in crammy little chambers, hiding from Sunday Mass or getting in trouble with Father Smith. In all this mess, the only constant: Steve. Whose hand he held when his mother died or when he had to throw up so badly after riding the Cyclone, Bucky thought his viscera might follow suit, soon.  
In the back of the room in their apartment, Steve’s rosary he had grabbed from the bedside table in a hurry clutched in his hands, that one winter Steve fell so sick, Bucky was sure he wasn’t gonna make it through. He knew it was his fault, he should’ve made sure that Steve stay in the apartment, wrapped up in at least two blankets at all times, he whipped his own back, Goddammit why did you let him go outside in the coldest winter in years, prayer after prayer falling from his lips. Worked himself rough to keep the temperature up for three weeks straight and hot soup on the stove. Steve’s lips were burning under his, when he got ready to say goodbye. His hands even colder than usual as Bucky folded them on his stomach.  
In the end, Steve survived. How, Bucky did not know but did it matter? He never thought so. Now, having all this time to himself and his thoughts, he thinks it must’ve been one last favor to him. _Here, have the boy for one more year, before the war, before you’ll prepare to say goodbye for the last time._  
In the mess of them, everything made sense. Entangled limbs that never seemed to want to disentangle, two shapes fitting perfectly into each other. In the soft light and the safety of their living room, swaying in the moonlight as the only record they owned played on Sarah Rogers’ old phonograph. Two boys from Brooklyn, hiding from the world in the place they’d made their home.

 _“I’m living in a kind of daydream_  
_I’m happy as a king_  
_And foolish though it may seem_  
_To me that’s everything”_

The first time Steve had kissed him (really kissed him and meant it), sitting cross-legged on the fire-escape under the stars, tasting of strawberries, cigarette smoke and himself — the sweet, sweet taste of sin Bucky never wanted to forget. It was risky, out there in the open with neighbors above and beneath them, suspicions already forming in their mind about the two boys who just moved into apartment 14B together.  
Steve had cried and Bucky had taken each of his hands into his own, entwining their fingers, holding them up to their chests. _Listen to me_. He rested their foreheads against each other softly, the tips of their noses touching. _I want to give you the world, Steve Rogers,_ he’d said and meant it.

How to fit all of this, keep it bundled up tight and safe? Without risking anything going missing? The older a memory is, the more prone it gets to changing. Suddenly, the curtains in the memory of your mothers kitchen aren’t yellow anymore but blue. Or your brain might add details, pieces from newer memories. You’d not know if the detail was true or false anymore.  
Some memories can be categorized as declarative memories, the ones you can clearly state as true or false. This might be as simple as remembering whether a person had blonde hair. Non-declarative memories however, not so much. Those, you cannot simply state as true or false. This might be something as fundamental and basic as knowing how to write or walk.  
So, where on this spectrum falls a person? You cannot just declare the existence of a person in your memories as true or false, can you?  
Bucky knows this: Steve Rogers is the fundament. Of his memory, of his existence, of _him_. A rock, a constant, in the whirlwind of life. Something to hold onto and keep him safe through whatever obstacles life throws at him.  
Steve Rogers, the memory, is everything that James Buchanan Barnes is. From childhood fo adulthood, from friendships to relationships.

He shuts the door to the memory, locks it and throws the key as far away as possible. _keep this safe for me; it’s important_. Like when you were a little kid, when your friend would tell you a secret and made you promise not to tell anyone. And you would pretend to zip your mouth shut, lock it and throw the key away with your flimsy arm. Only; you would forget about your locked mouth very soon and start talking again, like the lock and the key never existed.

 _Goodbye for now_ , he thinks and prays to God that Steve is still alive, somewhere, hopefully thousands of miles away from here, wherever _here_ may be.  
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I have promised to you in the darkest of days, that I will always watch over him and protect him with all that I am. For now that I have broken my promise, punish me, send me to Hell, if only you keep him alive and well.

  _Pater noster, qui es in cœlis;_  
_sanctificatur nomen tuum:_  
_Adveniat regnum tuum;_  
_fiat voluntas tua,_

Keep my boy alive and well, for he deserves to live more than this morbid war life. Guide him home, to a lovely wife and perfect children, somewhere the war cannot follow him. Watch over my darling boy, he shall know no more sorrow and grief.

  _sicut in cœlo, et in terra._  
_Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie:_  
_Et dimitte nobis debita nostra,_

Wash the smell of soot and gunpowder and death out of his nostrils. Keep the taste of blood and dirt and me off his tongue. Make him forget the gut-wrenching screams of his comrades as they drop to the ground like flies and the sounds of explosions and my panting voice in his ears. And make him forget the weight of a gun in his hands and the feel of my body under his.

  _sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris:_  
_et ne nos inducas in tentationem:_  
_sed libera nos a malo._

Help him lead this country out of the war and give him the world because I didn’t have the chance to.  
And if this war needs one last sacrifice, take my sinning soul, for I had turned my back on this country long before they took him and made him their symbol

_Quia tuum est regnum, et potestas, et Gloria, in saecula._

_Amen._

Somewhere, in a lab far below the ground, God knows where or when, a Soldier opens his eyes, a clean slate, a mind erased. No memory and nothing to remember.

_;like the lock and the key never existed_

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is how I deal with Post-Endgame trauma.
> 
>  
> 
> P.S.: The title is taken from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem ['You, you only, exist'](https://allpoetry.com/You,-you-only,-exist) and the song Steve and Bucky are slow dancing to is ['The Very Thought of You'](https://youtu.be/8bw5h-WPYBQ) by Al Bowlly


End file.
